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SearchBe Neither Aggressor nor Victim
When Jesus instructed his apostles that they should, when one unjustly took away the coat, offer the other garment, he referred not so much to a literal second coat as to the idea of doing something positive to save the wrongdoer in the place of the olden advice to retaliate-"an eye for an eye" and so on. Jesus abhorred the idea either of retaliation or of becoming just a passive sufferer or victim of injustice. On this occasion he taught them the three ways of contending with, and resisting, evil:
1. To return evil for evil--the positive but unrighteous method.
2. To suffer evil without complaint and without resistance--the purely negative method.
3. To return good for evil, to assert the will so as to become master of the situation, to overcome evil with good--the positive and righteous method.